


Little Boy Blue, Who Could Possibly Love You?

by TheSpaceCoyote



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU setting, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-03
Updated: 2013-03-03
Packaged: 2017-12-04 06:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/707404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpaceCoyote/pseuds/TheSpaceCoyote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"From then on, that feeling—it’s what he feeds on. It’s what fills his stomach when there’s no food. It’s what gives his long limbs purpose, it’s what fits perfectly into his body plan. It’s what signifies the strangeness. It’s what he comes to live by."</p>
<p>After the death of his father, John leaves the suburban life for that of a transient in the city. Alone and with only the adrenaline offered to him by his penchant for freerunning sustaining him, he eventually stumbles across another young man who may finally bring an end to his isolation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Boy Blue, Who Could Possibly Love You?

John's arms are about four inches longer than the average. Ever since he started puberty they'd continued to grow, like they were made of putty that was being slowly dragged down by gravity. They tapered off into long fingers, spindly and thin like spider's legs. 

That very simple fluke of genetics had resulted in a slew of nicknames as a young teen; some of them endearing, most of them demeaning.

John's friends in high school hadn't been all that much better. Even though the rest of the kids had started to grow into their full heights and fill out their frames, John still stood out like a sore thumb. His body was never a blessing--his athleticism hadn't matured past eighth-grade soccer, so the prospect of his height aiding him in jock-related popularity was low. His stature--and admittedly, his nigh obsessive love of movie trivia and paranormal lore--tended to unnerve girls more than it attracted them, even if he definitely wasn't the  _worst_  looking guy in town. A couple of guys had had their faces broken in more times than the Watergate. 

There existed a handful of things that his height  _was_  good for, but they never left John feeling all that much better. When his friends wanted to scare the living shit out of people on Halloween, John was the one who got to be masked in a black morph suit and leap out at people. Make them scream and jump back in horror, in fear. His friends had laughed and slapped him on the back and bought him dinner in exchange for his services. John had felt warped. 

Nevertheless, he remained a good kid. Even if his friends only valued him for capacity of his appearance to mold into the grotesque. John knew high school with its social conventions and self important shenanigans wasn't going to be his life's apogee. He kept up the smile and did well in class and made his dad proud. 

\------

On the 17th of March, three months before graduation, John's dad died. 

There was no car crash, no cancer. No heroic blaze of glory and no tearful sacrifice. It was almost comedic; John could have laughed. His dad had slipped in the kitchen. John hadn't even been the one to find him. His dad's girlfriend, Roxy--she had that honor. She'd been the one to call him sobbing, the one to drag his head down to her chest and cry into his hair and plant reassuring smears of purples lips across his forehead. 

Roxy planned the funeral for the 21st of April. She tried holding the house together and fill the void, but despite her best efforts there was nothing to be done at the time. Her cakes were too fluffy, too sweet. She preferred fondant flowers and edible pearls over buttercream. She liked jam filling instead of frosting.

She couldn't help. 

Thus, John just stopped. Stopped going to school, stopped going to work. Stopped going online. 

Eventually, he stopped going home. 

On the 13th of April, before Roxy had woken up, John shoved a couple of things into a ratty jean backpack and left. 

He crossed across miles of suburban terrain; strolling along the banks of strip malls and ducking under the shelters of the overpass until clipped lawns fell under the chaff of rotting storefronts and spray-painted brick.

The first couple of days John sleeps behind clusters of trashcans. Midway through the seventh night someone tries to snatch his backpack from him and John  _runs_ , sprints into an alleyway and takes a superhuman leap up the brick side, his long limbs finding steel and pulling his body up onto the flat of the fire escape. 

The exhilaration and the fear makes his heart ache but it sets his brain on  _fire_  and  _holy_  shit. Holy. Shit. He creates the image of an acrobat in his mind and the acrobat is him, a ninja light as air conquering towers of girders and brick and flaking paint and dew.

From then on, that feeling--it's what he feeds on. It's what fills his stomach when there's no food. It's what gives his long limbs purpose, it's what fits perfectly into his body plan. It's what signifies the strangeness. It's what he comes to live by.

The  _tap-a-tap-a-tap_  of the drummers on the street corner, the screech and honk of cars, the garbled shouts and swears, the subtle click of energy as red lights turn to green--all are the metronome to his movements, the beat he tries to keep with every swing, every thunk of impact, every slam of feet. 

Now the cradle of the giant steel doughnut on Fourth and Zeddemore is his bed, the light up letters spelling out RAY'S in bright red and cyan giving him just enough illumination to read newspaper scraps snagged from the ground or swiped copies of old books from the moldy libraries further downtown. 

Where he lives, the light of the Exxon sign down the block is just as bright as the moon.

\----

Each day John counts how many buildings he passes in an hour. He counts the number of windows on the second stories. He counts how many gargoyles perched on the precipice of the old historic buildings are missing ears. He counts the nearly empty bottles of soda he scrounges from the trash cans. He sticks his tongue inside the neck and swipes around for the sticky syrup. He checks the caps to see if he's won any prizes. 

Over the months he makes tallies about how many times he's almost been hit by a rogue cab, how many times he's broken fingernails against the brick when he can't quite secure a jump. Every night when he comes back to the doughnut he scratches the numbers into the wall of brown paint. 

He never counts the amount of times he sees people double back on the sidewalk and assumes its because of him. He never counts the moments that seek to bring him back to earth, and instead escapes to the far up reaches of the sky until he can almost scrape it with his hands. 

\----

On the 27th of December John is cold. 

The ratty coat he'd found on the sidewalk back in September isn't helping him too much. The brick and the metal are too cold against his back and his cheek so he decides to wander to keep his body warm. 

And for the first time in months John wanders outside the urban circle and back into the ragged fringes of houses. It's not quite suburbia. It's still a far cry from his old home and it makes him feel okay. 

He shuffles along the sidewalk, long limbs wrapped against his body and concealed in his shadow. At this point he's still wandering, but the sleepy cold is starting to get to him and he's devolved to half looking for a suitable place to crash. A hidden nook in a front yard, an inconspicuous electrical booth. Even a doghouse wouldn't be so bad, provided he could fit his body into it. 

He stops in his search, however, when a new noise filter through the familiar stream of sirens and creaking crickets. It's a sound that's not only organic, but human, even if it's nasal and faint. 

_"Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars_." 

It twinges in John's ears, and he swivels his head. The song continues, swelling the enchantment inside John's head with its twang, with its flavor. 

_"Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars."_

Eventually John manages to zero in---the voice coming from one of the houses on the street side opposite from him. The number 2171 displayed in green bronze on the front. It's not the best looking house but it's not too shabby either--it's a bit like a elegantly frosted cake that's been left to sit in the sun for an hour or so. 

John looks both ways before strolling across the street.

He sidesteps a bit in front of the house until he can pinpoint which window the soft sound is wafting from. It's the first one on the left side, and if the lack of reflected streetlight is any indicator, it's open. 

He hardly has to hop over the chain of the fence, overtaking it in little more than a elevated stride. The patchy grass of the front lawn glances on his ankles. 

_"Fill my heart with song, let me sing for evermore."_

For some reason, John feels the need to meet this Pied Piper. 

The wooden tiers of the house's side are hardly a challenge. Not to someone who cuts through air. 

_"Let me sing for evermore, you are all I long for, all I worship and adore. In other words, please be true."_

The words continue humming in his ears as John climbs, his long limbs making short work of the house's side. They get louder in increments as John gets higher and higher. 

_"In other words, In other words_ ,  _I lo---"_

The voice cuts off into a squawk the moment John pulls himself up to the window and perch precariously on the sill. He instantly regret doing this, if only because the singing has stopped. 

Also because the guy staring at him from the swivel chair set up in front of his lit computer probably is going to make a beeline for the phone and call the cops for you in about three, two, one,  _zero._

But the guy doesn't make any move. He keeps staring at you. The glow from the computer screen behind him lights his hair and whitens it in silhouette. It makes him look alien. 

After a long second, he cocks his head and presses two fingers to his temple. Contemplating John. 

"'Sup."

John suddenly feels a lot better because this guy's speaking voice is a lot like his singing voice. 

"Hey."

He teeters a bit on the sill, but his fingers grip the wood and he steadies himself.

"Uh. I suppose I should explain myself."

The guy shrugs and crosses his arms.

"It'd be nice."

John bites a canker sore forming on his lip. 

"I heard you," he whispers. "From outside."

John tries to wet his mouth but it's like trying to quell a fire with a turkey baster. 

He knows it sound horribly creepy. It's creepy enough that he's scaled some random man's house and onto his open window, but he went ahead and cranked the freak factor up to eleven. 

The man taps his tented fingers together before pressing them into his chin. 

"Well, bless my heart. And here I was thinking only teenage girls and rabid 40 somethings considered home invasions romantic. I don't know if the exception disproves the rule, though, you might just be an oddball."

John almost recoil at that, but the guy's tone really isn't degrading at all. He seems more amused.  

"Twilight jokes are still a thing, ain't they? If not I gotta find something else, gotta keep my material fresh for that special type of gentleman-cum-suitor that comes rapping at my chamber door."

He seems way too nonplussed for someone whose solitude's just been assailed by a window-hopping stranger who looks all the world like a bedraggled boogeyman.

The guy pushes the ground with his foot, turning the wheeled chair a tad. In the changing light, his eyes look a bit funny to John. But it might just be a trick of the eye. 

"You want to come inside, window bro? You're wigging me out just balancing like that. Stop defying gravity and get down before you give me a coronary man."

John teeters on the sill for a moment, fingers tapping nervously. Eventually he nudges a foot over into the room, the rest of his body eventually following. 

John feels like a baby taking it's first steps and it's strange, because lately he's been so sure and steady with his movements.  

The guy seems to pick up on this, because he clicks his tongue and mock chitters to John. He laughs a little and rolls his eyes. 

The room is warm, and that in and of itself is a blessing. The walls had looked so black from the outside, but now they took on a more amber tone. It might be the color of the wall paper, or the gaudy Oscar Mayer wiener nightlight plugged in near the door. It kind of reminds John of the doughnut, and it's comforting. 

As John looks around, he notices that the light reflects off a row of objects on a low bookcase. They look like glass beakers, like the kind he used to use in AP Biology class. He can see black, grotesque shapes floating in some kind of liquid inside them. Each with a little label pasted on, though in the dark he can't really read what they say. Nevertheless, he has kind of a good idea as to what they are. He looks at them a bit closer, turning his back to the guy. 

"Oh. Do you--You collect dead things?"

John hears the guy take a tense breath, almost like he's the weird one here. Weirder then the guy who just invaded his room on instinct. Weirder than the guy who usually lives inside a giant doughnut. 

"Sure do, Blue Eyes. Shit's cool or something. I don't know. It's just a thing that kind of started happening."

John studies the flasks for a bit, until the guy spins around in his chair once and then huffs loud enough to make him turn around. 

"Shit, man, I forgot. Way to fuckin' go Dave, you're gonna blow your whole chance with this fine slice of consort by acting so damn uncordial. Mom and Dad wont be happy if I fuck this up and lose them their chance at a mob of lil' grandkids. Anyway, window bro, what's your handle? 'Cause I'm going to keep feeling like a dick if I keep calling you that. Maybe there's something else I can call you, something more formal. The Führer of Fenestration? The Prince of Panes? The Ja'am of…Jambs?"

"Oh my god," John snorts, masking the sound into his hand. "Dude just. Stop. Oh my God."

He feel a bit more relaxed, even as Dave gets up to shut the window. Normally being in closed off spaces without any active source of air makes him feel trapped and scared, but not this time around. Not with the dizzying comfort brought on by the smell of body spray, formaldehyde and--some kind of fruit? Apples, maybe. 

John uncrosses his arms, letting one fall its full length down his body. His other hand rubs at his head and he smiles. 

"I'm John. Dave it's--it's real nice to meet you."


End file.
